On behalf of the Editorial Committee of the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association (CVMA), I wrote an editorial in the October 2001 issue of The Canadian Veterinary Journal (Can Vet J 2001;42:754–755) about how our Association could make its 2 journals searchable electronically. The editorial outlined the benefits of taking such a step and asked for expressions of interest from CVMA members with a view to providing the CVMA Council with the support it needed to approve the start-up costs in its next budget cycle. Those benefits included responding to a need expressed in readership surveys for making articles in the CVJ and the Canadian Journal of Veterinary Research (CJVR) searchable electronically; increasing the profile of the journals and the CVMA in veterinary medicine at home and around the world; increasing the journals' appeal to advertisers, who are a substantial source of financial support for CVMA priorities and services; and preservation of archival material. In addition, subsequent input by academics pointed out that the 300 plus Canadian veterinary students who graduate each year are trained to use journals on-line, and that the CVMA journals should be part of the material that they turn to in the years when they are developing lifelong learning habits and methods. Moreover, the CVMA has already invested in on-line projects (www.canadianveterinarians.net and www.animalhealthcare.ca) for the benefit of the profession and animal owners, and electronic archiving of the journals with PubMed Central would add another step in support of the CVMA priority on the successful practice of veterinary medicine.
PubMed Central is a not-for-profit, Web-based archive of journal literature for all life sciences. It was launched in the year 2000 by the United States National Library of Medicine at the US National Institutes of Health. It deals only with refereed (peer reviewed) journals and, therefore, it makes us a partner with other publications having similar standards to our own. Our costs are largely limited to the transitional ones of training staff and the formatting of our existing and future material into the computer language required by PubMed Central. More details are available from the managing editor, Ms. Heather Broughton, at the CVMA offices, and on the PubMed Central Web site (www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov).
The CVMA has a rigorous budgetary process in order to ensure the best use of members' dues. The Editorial Committee's proposal went before Council at the budget meeting of November 2001, but although it was viewed favorably in principle, it was not funded at that time. The Committee investigated third party sources of funding for the project but found that the Association was not eligible. After working with the executive director, Mr. Jost am Rhyn, with various members of the Executive, and with support from other members of the profession who read and use the journals, the CVMA Editorial Committee submitted to the November 2002 budget meeting a revised proposal that split the start-up costs over 2 years. I am pleased and grateful to be able to inform you that the CVMA Council has approved the revised proposal.
What does this mean in terms of next steps and when members can expect the service to be available? Journals' staff will work with Thomas Consulting, Inc. to prepare the necessary journal material for approval and hopefully acceptance by PubMed Central. Thomas Consulting, Inc. is a Canadian firm that has worked with publishers in Canada and the United States on similar projects, and it is well qualified to do the work. We expect that if the approval step is successful, the subsequent data transformation processes will be completed by mid-summer of 2003, at which time we will inform members that CVJ and CJVR articles for the years 2002, 2003-to-date, and ongoing will be searchable on line. It will be a subject of further discussion whether to invest in going back further in time to archive journal articles, such as to the start of the millennium (year 2000).
I would like to thank the president, past-president, and Council for their vision in approving this project, which will maintain the place of our journals and our Association as major players in veterinary medicine and in step with the leaders in modern scientific publishing. I would also like to thank those members who took the time to express support for this venture, as well as those directly involved, including journals' staff, current and past managing editors, editorial committee members, and the assistant editors of both journals.
